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Amazon said would require $5 billion in construction and other investments in New York

The deal for the Queens development, in Long Island City, was announced on Tuesday, after Amazon concluded a 14-month, countrywide search for a location for a second headquarters for some 50,000 well-paid tech workers. The company, which ended up picking two sites and dividing the new workers between them, is also opening a huge corporate site in Arlington, Va., in an area across the Potomac River from Washington.

The company also said it would develop a much smaller operations and logistics facility in Nashville, creating 5,000 jobs.

The announcement capped a frenzied competition among nearly 240 communities across the country. Many politicians saw it as an opportunity to remake their city or a neighborhood for the tech era. Some economists and policymakers warned against using public money to help one of the most valuable companies in the world, and of the potential for escalating housing costs and traffic.

Amazon will sell and ship Apple products, which it will get directly from Apple. It will also list products from some approved Apple resellers.

Sellers found out about the change Friday morning in a letter from Amazon, obtained by CNN Business. They have until January 4, 2019 to sell their existing products before Amazon removes all of their listings. Amazon recommended they contact Apple if they’d like to become an authorized reseller and continue selling products on its site.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has worked with retailers to crack down on third-party sellers. When AceBeach was selling some popular toys, Amazon started requiring documentation from manufacturers like Hasbro giving permission to sell their products, said AceBeach’s owner.
A 2013 Supreme Court ruling upheld the right of people to resell any items they have purchased legally, even if they are copyrighted. But as a business, Amazon has full control over who can sell what on its platform.
Sometimes it uses that power against its biggest competitors. Amazon has blocked the sale of Google devices like the Chromecast that compete with its own smart speakers and streaming devices. And even with this new deal, Amazon still won’t sell Apple’s HomePod, a competitor to Amazon’s Echo devices.

While not shown in the images here, images at the same site that provided the specs confirm the micro USB connector is under the base, and thus not normally accessible by the user. Speaking of micro USB, in related smart display news, I found out the other day the new 2nd gen Echo Show has a micro USB port that will allow the use of an Ethernet adapter (probably the same type that works with some Fire TV models). Good news for those that want a wired connection. Until now, the only smart speaker unit I knew of that could do that is the Google Home Mini.

amazon echo show

Google officially released the Home Hub, a $149 digital photo frame, YouTube video player, and visual recipe reciter (among other things) that looks to take on the second edition of the $229 Amazon Echo Show, which has been in release but is sold out through November 5th.

The Show screen is bigger and brighter. Advantage: Amazon

The biggest video site is Google. Advantage: Google

Amazon’s large collection of e-books and audio books is a natural fit here. Amazon offers “Story Time,” professionally narrated stories that get read to kids, as well as the huge Audible library of audio books.

Amazon said in a statement that their existing labor arrangement provided “the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce.”

I’m guessing that Bernie and Liz haven’t probably contemplated the real reason Amazon did what it did with raises. It had nothing to do with its employees and everything to do with hurting their competitors. Amazon has huge margins so this raise isn’t really going to effect their bottom line. However Target, Walmart and other grocery changes are now going to be forced to raise their raises to compete. There margins aren’t as large as Amazons so they will need to raise their prices which makes Amazon look like an even better deal to shoppers.

This irks the bottoms out of me. U have nothing to do so you go after Amazon, in case you forgot they hire a bunch of people. If Bernie and Elizabeth want to do some good, go after the GOP…remember…the egg heads in power. Go after Congress…remember… the egg heads that are doing nothing but approving bills but provide no solutions on funding. Or, better yet, go after the self-appointed genius POTUS Trump. Pitiful. Neither of you are going to be president, for sure, unless you change your ways.

Happy Times, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory a century ago employed a lot of people and abused them. It cost workers their lives. Today we have a similar if tamer situation. These people should not be so terrified of their abusers nor should the abusers have such absolute power. They need to be humbled.

The GOP?-Here is how that would play out. One side screams at the other, the other replies, CNN’s ratings go up, & nothing actually gets done. The average schmoe is still working in crappy conditions and income inequality stays. I am so very tired of watching my elders stupidly blame the other team for all that is evil but do not realize that the politicians they carry a torch for get bought off by men like Bezos in campaign funds…& they aren’t joining Bernie or Liz. “Neither of you are going to be president if you don’t change your ways!”-A reply: This country is not going to survive another forty years of neoliberalism on one side of the aisle and utter contempt for the poor on the other. You can only have a society that benefits billionaires and a tiny elite for so long before finally the volcano explodes. A politician being a social liberal is worth 0 to a schmoe if he does not care about more fundamental things like a living wage & being inches from poverty. Things the old guard is willfully blind to right now.

PS-Don’t tempt the young. Cutting Social Security entitlements could be one way to pay, and since so many of you shook your pom poms for policies that have hurt your children and their children very badly, they may eventually grow tired of a system where they must break their backs for benefits they will never see and bowing and scraping for idiots who don’t want to hear that it is no longer 1995 or 1965. The one s word that is not in the vocabulary of Boomers is SACRIFICE.

Poor Jeff Bezos. He just can’t stuff enough money into his bank account can he. Those pesky employees of his who travel the country like nomads trying to eke a marginal existence at his fulfillment centers are a greedy lot, are they not? And the mere fact that they are called fulfillment centers at all is a bit of a paradox in and of itself. Please everyone, show some mercy and help Jeff stuff his bank account. The poor man could use a hand up!

OK- newsflash WAPO- this scenario has occurred in thousands of workplaces over multiple decades. Management asking it’s leadership to be watchful of union organizing activity- but saying explicitly that they cannot prevent employees from pursuing union pathways. Generally when these atmospheres arise what happens is that management makes adjustments to things that relax the tensions. It amazes me that there is never any sense or perspective in the articles that the WAPO is publishing. This article is not informative- it’s gossip.

One day later, on Tuesday, an Amazon employee explained exactly why those decisions might be unpopular. In a public letter posted to Medium, an anonymous worker at the company outlined concerns about Amazon’s facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The product has been under fire since May, when the ACLU revealed that the company was offering it to police departments, raising serious civil liberties concerns.

What’s Rekognition?

Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, and the service can identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial recognition on images and video that you provide. You can detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.

“We know Bezos is aware of these concerns and the industry-wide conversation happening right now,” the employee wrote. ”On stage, he acknowledged that big tech’s products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for society’s ‘immune response.’”It’s the second anonymous callout post from a tech employee in less than a week. On Friday, a Microsoft worker separately raised concerns on Medium about the company’s interest in a $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the US Department of Defense. “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” the employee wrote.

That doesn’t mean you throw ethics out the window, the cost of scientific progress should and historically always has been weighed against ethics. And as society progresses and better understands the social costs of such research in terms of civil rights, it should draw a stronger line on what is ethical and what isn’t.

In today’s world if you don’t draw a line on basic civil liberty violations that are surely to come from these kind of surveillance programs, then the benefits of this technology don’t outweigh the harm. Not to mention, tech companies are sitting on piles of offshore cash that they would rather keep offshore to avoid paying taxes, and instead want the government to subsidize and incentivize research and development on spytech? Give me a break lol.

The choice of Medium is itself noteworthy: a platform that has in the past been a place for users’ first-person missives, and one built with a tech company ethos. Siobhan O’Connor, vice president of editorial at Medium, says the posts were brought to them by a person they knew, and then their authors were verified to be employees. Both posts were behind Medium’s gated paywall, limiting reach somewhat, although O’Connor says they’ve received a wide readership. She says she recognized the letters as “particularly interesting to the readers of a platform like Medium.”

Amazon.com isn’t America’s biggest company. By market cap, it trails Apple. Measured by number of employees, it’s behind Walmart. By revenues, it’s a distant eighth on the Fortune 500 list. But measured by importance to modern life and ability to shape the American economy in its own image, Amazon is second to none.

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos

Part of Amazon’s remarkable influence stems from the sheer variety of its business lines and the way it touches our everyday lives. Born in 1994 as a modest online bookseller, Amazon has grown organically and by accretion into an internet giant that plays in nearly every sector, from producing movies to transporting freight.
It has a full suite of electronic devices, including a digital assistant that thousands of consumers rely on to perform daily tasks (Alexa), an electronic reader (Kindle) and a home security system (Ring). Its server business hosts a third of the world’s cloud-based data. After deflating brick-and-mortar retail, it’s become a brick-and-mortar retailer itself with its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, its physical bookstores, and its foray into cashierless convenience stores. Now, it’s trying to become the place where you can find a handyman and fill your prescriptions, maybe even buy home insurance and get a loan.

The rise of online shopping is making bargain hunting something of a fool’s errand.

As more shoppers move online, the competition they are fueling between e-retailers like Amazon and traditional retailers like Walmartand Target is causing prices to become more uniform, according a new working paper distributed this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper’s author, Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo, examined a wide range of retail data to understand how the rise of online retail was influencing pricing behavior among retailers. Through his study, Cavallo found that prices have become less likely to vary from retailer to retailer or across different ZIP codes.

hen examining the price of grocery products at Walmart, Cavallo discovered products were more likely to have smaller differences in price across locations if those products could also be purchased on Amazon.

The main exception: The food and beverages category displayed more variation across brick-and-mortar locations, accounting for nearly all of the geographic price dispersion, Cavallo noted when analyzing prices at Walmart, Safeway and Best Buy BBY stores.

(Amazon, Walmart, Safeway, Best Buy and the National Retail Federation did not immediately return requests for comment.)

Here were some of Cavallo’s other findings:

Price changes now occur more frequently as online shopping has become more common. Regular prices (excluding sales and other discounts) lasted 6.7 months on average between 2008 and 2010, but only 3.65 months between 2014 and 2017.
In retail sectors where online retailers represent a larger portion of sales versus brick-and-mortar stores, such as electronics, price changes occur more frequently. For goods easily found on Amazon, the duration of a price is 20% shorter.
Because price changes occur more regularly, retailers will react more quickly to major shocks such as changes in gas prices or exchange-rate fluctuations. Consequently, the costs associated with the shocks are more readily passed through to consumers.
As for cases where prices aren’t changing quickly or becoming more uniform, Cavallo argued that concerns about fairness might be at play. “What people consider to be ‘fair’ in terms of pricing can change across countries, sectors, and time periods,” Cavallo wrote. “More work connecting pricing technologies, web transparency, and fairness will be needed to understand how pricing behaviors and inflation dynamics are likely to evolve in the future.”

Kim Kardashian finally introduced her newborn daughter to social media on Monday with a post on Instagram. The picture — taken before Kim’s recently revealed pink ’do — shows mother and daughter, in matching filters, snuggling in bed.

There she is! The baby would be more beautiful if it was a real picture and not filtered….the eyes and lips….come on kim

A little more than a month after Kim Kardashianand Kanye West welcomed Chicago Westinto the world, the newborn baby finally made her debut on Instagram. The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star took to social media on Monday with a sweet photo of the mommy-daughter pair decked out with a pink-hued teddy bear filter.

“Baby Chicago,” Kim captioned the selfie, which appears to have been taken before dying her platinum blond locks a bright pink color.

Fans caught their first glimpse of Chi when she made an appearance in the video Kylie Jenner shared when announcing the birth of her own daughter, Stormi Webster. Since then, Kim has shared updates on life at home with baby No. 3, most recently opening the doors to Chicago’s nursery.